Friday, October 1, 2010

Glass Confession #3 ~ Sometimes It Isn't Even Vintage

I came to collecting Pyrex (and later other brands of vintage glass) because of its safety and performance in the kitchen. That's right, I bought fridgies because I wanted something to store leftovers in and I was tired of the way the plastic lids on my newer Pyrex storage containers would break. I gave up storing food in plastic containers years ago, long before BPA was a dirty acronym.

I love glass and have always used it in my kitchen. Indeed, I am a glass and cast iron kind of cook, with the occasional stainless steel piece here and there. Glass performs beautifully whether you are baking brownies or chicken (not together please). I have long used a covered glass casserole to cook frozen vegetables in the microwave (I tried giving up the microwave for almost a year; it just wasn't worth it).

These Anchor Hocking 12 oz. covered casseroles showed up at my Goodwill last weekend. I knew they weren't vintage, but I also knew that I could find a way to use them. I had just purchased the little Pyrex 080 dishes and had started thinking of the benefits of cooking in individual casseroles, especially as we are a household of food allergies and intolerances. When I make a casserole I have to leave out pepper for one child, cheese for the other, etc. Now not only can I customize for food allergies but I can take into account food preferences as well.

After washing them I did notice something: they don't stack together neatly the way the vintage Pyrex does. I can't figure out why it would have been hard to engineer that, especially since Pyrex already did, more than half a century ago.

Overall I'm not looking for newer glass pieces, but I wasn't going to turn these away just because they sold them very recently.

2 comments:

Hi S.A.M.Wow, you are a dedicated mom. Good thing I don't have kids - they'd have to eat what i managed to sling at them ;) You know, I got to thinking about the name "Pyrex" and broke it down to 'pyr' or 'py' and 'rex'. One relating to fire the other Latin for king....fire king. Hmmm, where have I heard that before? ~~~Yes, those are our palm trees. How about that thunder? Loved a whole day of it.

One of my dogs hates thunder, so it is always stressful. But wow, the lightening storm late Thursday evenings was gorgeous and far enough away to be quiet.

I won't make separate meals, but I will accommodate their food preferences if it doesn't mean much extra work for me. So if I am putting veggies into a pot pie it isn't much work to leave out the carrots for the carrot-allergic child or peas for the pea-hater (oops ~ that's my DH). But individual pot pies are perfect for us, as two of us are gluten free and two aren't. Before I had to make everything GF.